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Despite being careful and doing the necessary research, MMOData.net cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here as it is based on various sources which could be incomplete, inaccurate or otherwise unreliable. Furthermore, all estimates are the opinion of MMOData.net and should be treated as such.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Version 3.8 thoughts and comments

Version 3.8 is only a small update, mainly to add the revised datapoint for Star Wars The Old Republic.

I will also talk about Runescape and Second Life, which I didn't mention in my v3.7 thoughts and comments.

About Star Wars The Old Republic

While I thought I would not get any new SWTOR numbers any time soon, I was mistaken, we got some new numbers, although not very exact ones, so I was not not completely wrong either :)

I get my new info from the 2012 Wedbush Conference, here are the comments from EA. I will quote the parts we are interested in :

Star Wars, this is an area that I think has got a lot of people anxious. I've heard from investors today saying that we must have 800,000 subscribers. I heard 600,000 yesterday. So what I think a lot of people have misunderstood is we said we had 1.7 million subscribers on the last call, which was about a month ago. What that was about was the fact that only about – just about half that number had triggered through their 30-day point and become active subscribers, our definition of recurring subscribers.

We had about half that total still in the 30-day trial period, but they're subscribers because that first month is including with a package good. What I said a month ago was, just over half. I can now confirm for you today that the vast majority of the 1.7 is now triggered through that point and they're recurring subscribers.

I am not giving you my fiscal 2013 guidance, but it is very clear on the surface that some of the craziness that was out there in terms of misunderstanding [ph] this is that I can (10:04) clear up today. It's a very strong entry. We still have a lot of future in front of us. We're two months into the launch, a lot more to go, but 1.7 million, vast majority now, are recurring subscribers.

Let me offer some metrics on purchase and subscription that will help you understand thisbusiness. As John stated, we have sold through two million units of the game since December. We currently have a little over 1.7 million active subscribers. The rest have either not started playing yet or have opted out.

So the vast majority of the 1,7m resubscribed, now we have to determine what that vast majority is :p, 80%, 90% maybe? If I lay this info next to the Xfire numbers and server load I can come up with a pretty close estimate, and that is what I did in v3.8, where the number is revised upwards.

After the initial rush, there was a steep decline in activity, but overall SWTOR manages to keep a sizable chunk of players subscribed.
I have to conclude that SWTOR is a bit more stable than I initially estimated and many players keep paying while not playing or playing a lot less.

I will keep a close eye on the game, there is still a large untapped potential in Asia, where they were off to a reasonable start in the Asia pacific region with 3 heavy loaded servers.

Lastly, I consider the game stabilized now, if the server loads and Xfire metrics drop even more, and no new official numbers are released, the charts will reflect the decline, I will wait until April before making any attempts on a new estimate.

About Runescape

It may look that Runescape lost a lot of subscribers, and they did, but there are 2 important factors you should take into consideration :

First of all with the migration from Runescape Classic to Runescape 2 there may have been some players lost, my listing does not differentiate between the two. Nowadays Runescape 2 is just called Runescape and Runescape Classis is pretty much closed down.

Secondly, and more important, the war against bots, macroers and other cheaters increased to unbelievable heights.
In 2009 Thousands got banned, but that was peanuts compared to the 9,2 million banned accounts in 2011. 9,2 million, I think that must be the largest anti cheater operation in history.

I applaud Jagex for fighting the good fight.

About Second Life

Well they did it, they stopped giving out their quarterly reports. Now it is not that big of a deal anymore since they basically stripped all the useful numbers out of the report over the years.
Tateru Nino has a good article on it here.
IMHO Linden Labs and Second Life are not doing great, otherwise they would keep publishing the reports. But the decline did not start today, as was already apparent by their stagnating numbers tipping into a decline.

I do hope the PCU numbers will stay published, so we still have some kind of an idea how the game ( or metaverse ) is doing.

Update
Added all the relevant quotes on SWTOR from the 2012 Wedbush Conference, in addition to the one I already posted.

30 comments:

According to your own definition, a subscriber is someone who either made a $1 or more payment to play for the month, or someone who is in his first month. I don't understand why you refuse the 1.7m data point.

I'm still wondering if applying Xfire metrics to SWTOR makes sense. From all I've been reading, its player base seems mostly to consist of single-player biodrones or SW nerds, who obviously have no need for Xfire.

You don't consider people who use Xfire to be a self selecting population? Those that are drawn to Xfire tend to consume many games and jump from game to game, so they look to a service like Xfire to keep in contact with frieds.

In reality you're looking at a sub-group of a game's subscriber population who (in all possibility) are statistically more likely to "finish" with a game and move on.

I've got the opposite question of thundersteele: why do you accept the 1.7 MM number given in the Feb 1 quarterly earnings? In the Mar 8 interview they clarify the Feb 1 number (just before the "vast majority" line). The CEO says that the the Feb 1 1.7 MM number had "just about half" paying (with the other half still in the free trial, see the Q&A section later and the question that starts with "Just on the subs for Star Wars").

tl;dr shouldn't the Feb 1 number of 1.7 MM really be .85 MM because only .85 MM paid/committed to paying?

4. MMOData.net Subscription definition :Subscription based MMORPG's are tagged with SSMMORPG subscriptions must meet one of the following requirements to be allowed on the subscription based charts :- Susbcribers who have paid a subscription fee of minimal $1 per month.- Players who have an active prepaid card of minimal $1 per month.- Players who have purchased an mmorpg and are within their free month of access.- Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days, if there is a revenue of $1 or more per subscriber per month.- Players who purchased virtual items or ingame currency for $1 or more per month.

I think your newest estimate is much more reasonable. I do data analysis and forecasting for a living and SWTOR happens to be the game I'm paying attention to at this time. With that said, I've been giving it extra scruitiny. I don't agree with many analsysts who project 2M subs by June, but your initial estimates seemed out there.

If I were going to try to model an MMO's subs based on X-fire trends I would likely try to include assumptions about release frenzy, holidays, gradual decline of Avg. Hours Played/day (people play less often at max level), content patches, and more.

It would be really interesting to see if you could train a Neural Net to produce a reasonable relationship between the two.

Yeah, you mentioned that in another thread. What I was trying to point out was that as Average Hours/day per player declined you would also see a decline of players/day with no necessary decline of active accounts.

When you look at how the game is set up, as someone is leveling to 50 (and gearing out in pre-raid gear) they're likely to play as many hours as they can fit in because there is plenty of content to consume.

Eventually they'll reach a barrier where they're limited by raid lockouts (if they raid) and/or dailies and weeklies. They likely won't be playing as often or for as long as they did. So as the population of a server swings from "Leveling" to "End Game" you'll see declines of both of the aforementioned metrics even with stable subscriber population.

So what you would want to do is to find out the Avg # Hours played per player and see how that has changed over time so that you can normalize # of Players per day.

Article came out today and it hints that there may be another announcement coming soon, which I would assume would be a positive announcement. Indications from those on the development team have been firmly in the "growing" category as opposed to the "holding stable" category. Of course you would expect them to put the usual rosey spin on anything that could reflect poorly on their game

I'm not really seeing any evidencial basis for your claims. Official numbers don't HAVE to come from the financial statements, but they often do. It is pretty clear that as of the end of February Bioware is claiming to be holding somehwere around 1.7 million.

Do you have anything but smug contrarian bullshit to offer? EA has an INVESTOR RELATIONS PAGE. I suggest you famialiarize yourself with it. I certainly have. You can find it by googling "EA INVENSTOR RELATIONS."

There has been one number and one number only given. 1.7 million subscriptions as of 12/31/2011 (on 1.76 million sales). This was in the 02/01/2012 press release with the 3Q financial report. The press release also cited the 01/31/2012 sales as 2 million but (tellingly in my opinion) did not give 01/31/2012 subscription numbers.

The press-release Joystiq cited in their article to say the game stablizied at 1.7 million did not contain any subscription numbers and dealt solely with ME3. Rather, the write-up was an off the cuff, non-defined term -- vast majority renewed -- passed on by a fourth-rate 'journalist' working for a second-rate gaming site.

That's all. Those are the facts. No matter how much you or anyone else wants to make up different facts.

Now, I suspect the reason this moronic crap got passed on as fact is because these Joystiq "journalists" don't have a clue. After all, they're just a bunch of barely-educated fanboys. THey're certainly not accountants, financial service people or economists who might actually ask an intelligent financial question and understandn the answer. They're certainly, in this area, not up the kind of reporting we'd get as the WSJ, Forbes or Business Week, where a financial markets journalist would have asked for the REAL NUMBERS and tried to get a FOLLOW UP instead of repeating some off-the-cuff, non-defined number.

Now, just to let you know, Ibe's number is probably too high. He over-corrected his first number of 1.2 million which was, when made, probably correct.

Like him, I like to know these things. After all, I was a CPA for decades and forecasts and projections and the related were part of what I did. So, in trying to figure what's happening with SWTOR, I follow the server traffic and XFIRE users. For a game that sold 2.2 million copies to date, there is about half the XFIRE discreet sessions and a HUGE deacrease in server traffic from the 1.7 million copie sold stage.

So, basic rule: You don't lose 50% of the unique XFIRE users in two months while increasing the base units sold 500K unless there is a major problem with retention. Even with the free-trial weekend, users peaked at under 4700 at PEAK Saturday gaming.

That's a LONG WAY DOWN from the peak running around 8200. And, remember, there are 500K more boxes in that pool...

8200/1700000 is .48%

4700/2200000 is .21%

That's a huge decline in session ratios in a statistically signficant population. Or, in short, despite a larger install base, the play base is declining rapidly. The ratios just highlight how fast the decline is...

As for me, I was actually here for Guild Wars. I was going to ask if Ibe has sources on active accounts. I'm getting ready to head back onto GW2 and wanted to explain to a friend what kind of player-base she could expect over the next few years. I was going to use GW1 as a reference point.

But hey, enjoy your denial. I don't care. The game isn't going away. I'm only curious to peg the bottom.

You track Guild Wars active accounts? I'm looking for the number. I have a friend. She, and possibly her husband, are interested in Guild Wars 2. But they've lived through a number of "hot MMO crashes" and don't want to just jump in.

I told her that GW sold about 6.5 million copies over its life. But I don't know the active account profile.

Thanks for the info, however World of Tanks does not meet the requirements to be considered an MMORPG, you can read the definition here :http://mmodata.blogspot.com/search/label/Requirements%20and%20definitions

Correct me if I am wrong, but WoT has a lobby/chatroom based front with small multiplayer games of maximum 30 players, therefore it is not considered an MMORPG, but a multiplayer online game like Diablo II.

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